The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission intends to conduct some portion of the potentially resumed proceeding on licensing a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., in the state, NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki told Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) in a recent letter.
Svinicki responded on May 19 to a letter earlier in the month from Nevada’s senior senator on the location for the long-frozen adjudicatory proceeding, should it receive the necessary federal funding to restart. Lawmakers and other officials in Nevada have argued the state should host the adjudication.
“Please be assured that with respect to proceedings on the Yucca Mountain construction authorization application, the NRC intends to follow its longstanding practice that adjudicatory proceedings be held in the general area of the proposed facility to the extent practicable,” Svinicki wrote. “Presiding Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards may hold limited portions of a proceeding at NRC headquarters in Rockville, MD, or by telephone or video conference. Such circumstances may, for instance, involve scheduling or case management matters or matters involving classified information or Safeguards Information.”
Agency spokesman David McIntyre said this week he could not speculate on the plan for future adjudication sessions beyond what Svinicki described.
The federal Nuclear Waste Fund would pay for the adjudication. The NRC currently has less than $500,000 in its available balance from the fund, which is not enough to pay for the proceeding. While the Trump administration has clearly signaled its intent to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain, Congress has yet to comply.
The George W. Bush administration Energy Department in 2008 filed its NRC license application for a repository in Nye County, Nev., that would hold tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The Obama administration suspended the proceeding two years later. By that time the application was subject to roughly 300 technical and legal challenges from stakeholders – more than 200 from the state of Nevada alone.
A number of NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Boards were adjudicating challenges to the Yucca license in 2010, and actually rejected the Obama DOE’s request to fully withdraw the application. A number of sessions of the adjudicatory hearing were conducted at a facility near McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas before the process was suspended in 2011. However, that site was later decommissioned, so a new location or locations would be needed for further in-state sessions.
The commission last year directed NRC staff to look for possible sites for adjudicatory hearings, possibly including remote sessions by video, McIntyre said. Further information about that process was not immediately available. Without additional appropriations from Congress, the actual adjudication cannot begin.
A new board or boards could authorize contentions to be included in the commission’s review of the license application for the Yucca Mountain repository, which if restarted could take up to five years.
Heller’s May 8 message to Svinicki was the latest in a series of letters between the lawmaker and the NRC chair over Yucca Mountain. He expressed appreciation for Svinicki’s “generally through responses” to other questions but upbraided her for “unsatisfactory answers” on the matter of siting the license application adjudication. The question is one of due process for the people of Nevada as the federal government considers sending radioactive waste into the state, according to Heller.
He asked Svinicki to directly answer this question: “Given the NRC’s longstanding practice of holding local hearings and its previous establishment of a dedicated hearing facility in Las Vegas, will you commit to holding key substantive portions of the Yucca Mountain proceeding in Nevada should administrative adjudication be restarted and sufficient resources become available?”
Heller’s office this week did not respond to requests for comment on whether he was satisfied by Svinicki’s latest statement.
The Trump administration has in its two budget proposals requested funds for DOE and the NRC to resume the licensing process. The omnibus budget for the current fiscal 2018 did not include any money for Yucca Mountain. Congress so far is split on the fiscal 2019 request: House appropriators have recommended $100 million more than DOE’s nearly $170 million request, while their Senate counterparts have offered no money for the program.
